He had been looking down, half trying to make out the designs in the mosaic-tiled floor; now he looked up. She had been looking at him, but her gray eyes fled direction as he lifted his own.
He said, “And you do nothing, then, save spin? Have you no amusements? Even inexpensive ones?”
She nodded, and gathered wool from the distaff. “I read. That is, I am read to. Rano allows me to sell the thread and yarn, and, well, they aren’t really very good, but it’s good wool, that’s good, it can be used again to make better thread and yarn, and I have no need for money, so there is someone who takes away my basketful and in return brings me books and I am read to. While I spin. When one of the Greeks can be spared to do it, who can read Latin, too, you know. And after they are read, the books go back. In that box there is the one the Greek, Demou he’s called, was reading to me, but he was called to the warehouse for work and he hasn’t yet come back.”
The house of Rano was one of the older ones, black and squat and reeking, although attempts had been made to give it some sort of gloss, as witness the floor — at this exact moment the she-troll cleaning beans cleared her nose and throat and spat upon the floor adjacent her — and the furnishings (as though furnished from some captured town, the troops having had their three-day plunder, the followers allowed three days more before the torch was set and all these furnishings gathered in haste late upon the afternoon of the sixth day). As for the box indicated, it was the sort of box that a yeoman farmer might have purchased in some good year, long ago, the taxes being paid and for once the larder and the corn-cribs full. He knew that sort of box full well.
“Would you like me to read to you?” asked he. Where was Rano? Was he never coming back?
And she answered, her eyes so low cast down, “If the master wishes. It would be very kind.”
He opened the box, it contained the usual jumble of broken fibulae and bracelets sans catches, here a charm and there a bauble; and set aside from all of that a smallish book, a codex in form and binding and not a scroll. “Where shall I begin?”
“Where you may be pleased. Perhaps he marked where he left.” She pinched off a bit of wool and was about to add it to the thread, and it broke; she caught the spindle and, with a sigh, made to mend the work. The servant, likely slave, had indeed left a bookmark; thither Vergil turned. A glance showed him the book was entitled The New Anabasis, and he was sure that he had never heard of it and that it deserved no such grand titule. The calligraphy lacked the cunning of the professional book-copyist; whichever old soldier had passed declining years in composing the work had probably pressed his own servant into use: whichever one could, as it chanced, belike, write: to scratch and scribble with a stylus into cold wax was one art, but to make and mend a pen and write cleanly with slow-drying ink — this was another art yet. And a harder one.
Vergil cleared his throat. “Here they were invited, in fact constrained, to join a procession to the Temple of Jove in Alexandria Olympia, where the Thunderer was worshiped under the Syrian name of Haddad.” He was mistaken, he had read this before: where? “The procession had been organized, at the first sign of bad weather, by the local dyers’ guild, for …”He heard his voice growing slower and slower as, incredulous, he recollected where. . and when. . he had read this before….
About to beg pardon for interrupting the reading and to ask more precisely whence she had this book, he looked up: Their eyes met again, this time met full on, and such a flash glittered from hers that he had, even while he gave the motion no thought, to lunge and save the volume from falling to the floor.
“Who are you, then, Poppaea?” he demanded. “Who is it that you really are? And what is it, then, that you are really doing here?” He did not touch her.
The eyes that had glittered a moment before now flowed with tears, and she wiped them clumsily with the wool-full distaff. “It does not matter,” she said, weeping. “Oh, it does not matter, not at all. I am the matron of a magnate of Averno, and I sit in his house and I spin. The spinning is worthless, but a Roman matron spins, she spins, and when Rano remembers that he has a wife at home who sits and spins, it makes him feel that he is something like a Roman patrician. And as for me. . it occupies my hours and even when no one is reading to me, the labor of it soothes my mind, and helps the time to pass. How white your skin is, and how black your hair and beard.”
“But, Poppaea, if it was you who — ”
She shook her head, the tears still flowed, she took up now a gauzy stole and wiped them, and they ceased. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t speak of it, please.”
Half, he rose. “Shall I not go then?”
She said, somewhat in haste, almost in alarm, “Oh no. No. At least not yet. Rano has told me to show you high respect. He instructed the servants, when the clepsydra strikes — ” She paused. He hearkened. In an inner part of the house, a single hollow ring. The hollow metal ball within one of the chambers of the clock had, as the last of the water dripped away, struck against the floor of the chamber. A murmur, followed by the bustle of things being moved, feet sounding, and the rustle of garments; the dirty toes meanwhile vanished, the dried beans rattled in the pans, their selectrix gave a hortatory squall or two: In came servants bearing wine and water and plates of cakes, olives, nuts, fruits, and sweetmeats and tables to set them on; and scented water to wash hands and fingers and napkins with which to dry them. The settings did not match, but what matter, they were heavy and rich, and looked as though they might have come from the plunder of the first three days in several cities.
“… and I hope, Master Vergil,” said Poppaea, “that you will especially try these pears conserved in mustard and honey, for it is a very especial honey and comes from far away, far across the Indoo Sea, and it is a honey that flows from a sort of reed, called saccharum.”
Gravely he thanked her, tasted with an air of judgment, nibbled in silence; then praised. She smiled faintly. The clod servants grunted, lolled their thick tongues in their mouths; one of them actually shoved the conserves closer. “Take more,” said this impertinent hobgoblin. “Take more, Wizard Man. Master very rich.” Doubtless his and the other thick tongues would help lick the platters clean of whatever costly syrups could not be scraped back into the jars. It would add a relish to the beans.
And the spelt.
Master very rich.
I am the matron of a magnate of Averno, and I sit in his house and I spin.
Very true. Very true. But not only did she know that the honey called saccharum came from beyond the great isle Taprobane, from the other side of the Erythraean Sea, farther than which no Roman ship had ever fared, she knew that no bees produced this novel and fantastically costly syrup; what else did she know? She knew how to send him in dreams the text of a book that she herself could not even read. She spun, as a matter of form and status alone, her woollen yarn and her oft-breaking thread. What else did she spin? he wondered. And the answer, not spoken aloud, was, a web.
And one that now seemed sure to hold him fast.
To hold him fast indeed.
As always, when he began, had begun, to be attracted by a particular woman, the air seemed full of little flecks of gold; so, even here, in the thick, hazy, stinking air of Averno. But. Even so. So or not so. The work, his work in Averno, continued — and he reflected once, quickly and with some small wry amusement: If it continued at its present pace he would be here longer than the two weeks for which he had hired the mare; the likelihood of Fulgence the liveryman following him was, however, extremely slight — and as it seemed not unlikely that the work would pay more than had been hinted (however slight those hints), Vergil moved yet once again; and this time to what passed in Averno for a better neighborhood. How much better went up in his estimation when he saw a litter and its bearers in the street outside — though some second thoughts he had when he saw that not a litter alone stood there, but a lictor as well.